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Dick Tracy, 3/26/19

Oh, huh, I must be losing it, because a couple weeks ago when we were introduced to a new character, a cocky local sports reporter and columnist, it had already slipped my mind that a couple weeks before that we had already been offered a glimpse of a stab-happy sports reporter! I guess this is all just some kind of intra-jock feud. Anyway, this is part of the Dick Tracy narrative M.O. in which the perp is always the most obvious person and the “drama” comes from the MCU’s dogged and violent pursuit of the that person, not any kind of clever “solving” of “crimes” or anything like that. Meanwhile, I can’t tell if “It wasn’t you, was it?” is meant to signify “Oh no, I married a murderer, how could I have been so blind?” or “Ugh, you promised you wouldn’t murder any more gym teachers, can’t you just do this one little thing for me?”

Gil Thorp, 3/26/19

I certainly hope all this mysterious talk of “family stuff” is referring to the Human Family, a local doomsday cult who’s been heavily recruiting Milford teenagers this year. “Well! That explains things,” says Mohawk Guy, around hour four into the Patriarch’s sermon in which he blames the failure of the Cleansing to arrive on the appointed date on the corruption of the “real” Mayan calendar by Spanish conquistadors.

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Spider-Man, 3/21/19

I am, genuinely, done making fun here. If Newspaper Spider-Man wants to spend its last few days in the media landscape engaged in utterly pointless bait-and-switches over readership expectations vis-à-vis whether or not Peter is or is not wearing his spider-costume under his shirt, then I say go for it. One of the very first sequences I went through that really taught me what this strip was all about came in 2005, in which Peter’s undergarments were or perhaps were not a problem, with the changes having nothing to do with Peter’s own on-panel efforts. My point is that this feature is going out very much on its own terms. We should all be so lucky.

Family Circus, 3/21/19

One of my least favorite Family Circus things — and lord knows there’s a list — is when some semi-universal cultural touchstone unfolds in real life, like the Olympics or the NCAA basketball tournament, and we’re expected to believe that the Keane kids can’t stop pulling catchphrases from it. It took me a second to notice that Dolly is rubbing her arm here, indicating (I assume) that Billy hit her with the ball, or maybe just punched her and then quickly grabbed a ball so that he could say “I didn’t punch her! Both my hands are clearly occupied in holding this ball!”; before I realized that, I thought maybe he had just farted.

Gil Thorp, 3/21/19

I’m not really a “sports guy” so I sometimes I find myself in the position of wondering what it is that’s confusing me about Gil Thorp: the sport content or the trademark choppy narrative. Like, today, I don’t get why the idea of a scrimmage seems so freighted, and I don’t understand half of what Gil is talking about in panel two. But I do sincerely hope that panel three takes place nine days later, that the scrimmage drama was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and that the phone call Mimi is wrapping up here is acknowledging that and we never hear anything else about it.

Dick Tracy, 3/21/19

“It’s your case too, Joe. Go ahead, rifle through the drawers and get your fingerprints all over everything. Take a dump in the middle of the floor! Nobody can stop you!”

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Gil Thorp and Dick Tracy, 3/8/19

“Cinematic universes” are all the rage lately, as the twelve or so corporations that own all of broadcasting and publishing try to squeeze synergy out of whatever grab-bag of intellectual property they’ve assembled out of the last decade or so of agglutinative media mergers. One of those companies is Tribune Publishing (briefly known as Tronc), which hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory lately, and its current roster of comics is no match for Marvel or DC. Still, I’m pretty excited about this epic crossover event that will launch the Tronc Extended Universe, in which Marty Moon, having been humiliated by Gil for the last time, starts killing gym teachers and coaches across the country, honing his skills until the day he’s ready to take down his nemesis.

Marvin, 3/8/19

It is kind of sad that Jeff and Jenny have spent their entire date night talking about their awful baby, and it’s weird considering how happy they look. I guess they were probably mostly talking about how far away their awful baby is, and how they can’t hear or even smell him, even a little!